A Glimpse of One Mad Eye
by Demyrie
Summary: A series of unconnected moments, all waged upon the world by Commander Erol. A creature of opportunity, amoral and sensual, his power swallows all. DemzspeshultypeErol, mind. Enjoy!


A/N: Okay. So this has been sitting on my hard-drive for forever!

This is aiming towards a collection of shorts concerning Erol. His life, his opinions, his fears, his experiences and relationships: tada! They'll hop all over the place, and, I warn, will ALL be mature or deal with disturbing subject matter (as befitting my Psycho Erol), but I like them all in their own ways. I write them as they pop up in my head, with little-to-no continuity.

This one, I love. I believe that Erol fears few things, and fears them intensely, but this was a real discovery on my part. LOVES ME SOME JAK FANDOM, PEOPLE. C'mon, give it some love!

Demz loves you! (But she loves her Eroltastic Weiila more, because she's so special and MISSED and mwahmwah and stuff!)

-.-.-.-.-

Stuff of Nightmares

-.-.-.-.-

Only once have I killed out of spite.

Note that my father is not among this number. Yes, he is dead; but it is an entirely removed, secluded experience to set off a chain of events which end in someone's death, rather than commit the act yourself. One is efficient, the other is personal.

The particular death of which I speak was purposeful, and entirely motivated by rage. Curiously enough, he was one of my boys-- and a peculiar one at that. I took a rather general approach to boys at first, before I had narrowed my technique and found my priorities. I avoided details, hitting every concept thinly to avoid missing important points completely. Scatter-gunning.

For example, I took them out in town far more frequently. This was mostly at their urging, but I ignorantly mistook any form of their accustomed pastimes to be worthy of my scrutiny— I felt that to be with them in their habitat, crowded and hive-like and pungent as it was, was the closest form of quality time where I could study them and converse with them at their ease.

This was before I realized the treasure of an analysis cell which was my apartment.

Free of any distractions—of their conditioning, of their façade, as it were—they became entirely different people. There was also a certain lack of safety that I cherished. Yes, any number of brutal bouncers in a club crowd would likely shake their hands and knife them the following moment for sake of a wallet, but they were accustomed to that threat and they knew what to avoid. In my apartment, however, the general threat was absent—they were painfully out of their element, out of their brand of danger.

After all, I was not after wallets. I had a salary, and treated them generously with it. Their discomfort lay in not knowing what I required from them.

I never locked the door. I hid no threat in any action, nor did I make threatening overtones. I served them, entertained them, as much their consort as in any other circumstance. It was a perfect translation of behavior from public to private. To their knowledge, they were safe.

But to be forced to focus on one threat? One very distinct, very subtle threat-- with no other form of entertainment or distraction present? Oh, their minds flew. Pure possibility at its most dangerous. Some perceptive children ate in on themselves, a baseless suspicion driving them to distraction, to slopped liquor cans. Others were completely unaware of any danger.

His name was Rauv.

A handsome boy-- too old for his years, even abiding by the trend of overt slummer maturity. He had dark, fairly coarse hair which curled over his ears in the most entrancing, feathery way—very feminine. His body was wry, bony, and he walked with a perpetual slouch. I almost broke him of it before I killed him.

One of my productive amusements was to see how much authority I had with a child. Even as their… consort, shall I say, my age always placed me in a dominant, almost paternal role. As a way of testing our dynamics, their capacity for respect and trust and so forth, I would take a long-imbedded habit and approach its reform very lightly—and see how quickly they conformed. One girl had a grisly habit of chewing her lip casually, and to a mush of blood when agitated. I mentioned it once and, for the remainder of our time together, she held her lips preternaturally still, to the point of slurring her speech. It was pleasantly startling, but others were not so quick to follow.

Most slowly, unconsciously responded to my urging. There never was one that didn't respond.

Still, Rauv was the first and last of his kind. He was dark, bold, and firmly imbedded in the hourless, wailing night-scene. Drugs and stimulants were his hobbies—how I ever accepted this, or felt myself immune to it, I don't know. How I ever felt that this bastard trait would not infiltrate my life on spiders' legs, I don't know. I felt he was a person outside his dirtier tendencies, and took faith in that. After all, he was interesting.

Once, when walking out of a club, Rauv did something that will always remain crystal clear in my mind. Now, he had always taken to keeping quite close to me. When walking, our elbows brushed, almost as if he wanted to secure and renew his connection to me with each step.

It was vain, true—a form of bragging. I was the show dog, the crime force pervert captured by a mere boy. But he was amusing in his own way, and full of surprises.

-.-.-

As earnest as his intentions were, his apartment seemed more and more appealing with every dip into the tar-black, nightmarish club-scene. Tailored. Controlled.

_He came out tacky with sweat, gritty with wet puffs of powder. He had spent two hours at the bar: waiting, becoming intensely annoyed with Rauv's companions and his world, all the while enduring glossy stares perfected and prolonged by any number of designer drugs. But soon they were outside, Rauv falling in beside him on the wet, dark concrete like a handsome ragdoll. He peered up through his hair. The commander's face was faintly cold, slick and aloof—tension sat between them, a force to be cut._

_It was chill out, but a periwinkle chill—nothing bitter. Equally so, Rauv was aware of his childish trespasses, but knew his standing with the commander could be far, far worse. _

_  
"Erol," He tried throatily. The man's amber eyes flickered, seeming to herald the end of a stillborn conversation. His boots scraped the ground._

_Rauv knew nothing of this man's weaknesses, but as Erol began to walk forward, he grabbed the commander's long white hand in his own._

_And held it._

-.-.-

Aside from intertwining our fingers, I expected him to do something with this new hold on me. Perhaps he aimed to play with my fingers in some coy fashion—articulate some crass, underground language of sex—but as we simply stood there, his hand a complex weight in mine, unmoving and intent… I realized I had entirely missed the gesture.

He was holding my hand.

The irritation of the night absolutely shattered and misted upwards as dusty red burrs. I was seized with amusement at this quaint, wheedling little move of his. I laughed, earnest and long, until my head was thrown back and my chest was tired and pleased. Oh gods, the _thought_ of it. Then I smiled down at him, and he returned it, those almond eyes clear and gleeful and drug-free. Still smiling, I actually let his hand rest in mine, and walked onwards towards my apartment.

He was interesting; such a perverse concoction of vain and bright and ignorant and quaintly manipulative. That I saw in him, even if I did not see the threat.

While the threat lay in Rauv and his consumptive world rather than the boy himself, the last night I spent with him was horrific by any means or definition.

-.-.-

The shutters were open. A sheet of grey, damp evening sky stretched across one wall, stacked with dark buildings at the bottom. Erol sat in his strong, open, proper way, back curving to fit his chair. He drank water with a limp wrist and little interest, instead focusing on the tangle of a boy on the carpet below him. A burst of heat faded quickly from the bare room as they sat. Rauv had just instigated a brief bit of sex, kneeling at the foot of his consort's chair with both hands plunged into his work as he swallowed hurriedly, but now deemed his quota fulfilled and was content to play with his powders. Erol wondered urbanely at the ego just asserted on him. He had not asked for anything, and yet. The self-assigning tendencies of youth fascinated him, all because of how closely they were equated with their self-worth, but tonight he kept his usual psychoanalyzing to a minimum. For now, he was content to watch Rauv's wickedly crooked fingers—broken three places in an iron shade, he had crowed—prod busily at powders and scoop them into plastic cocoons. 

_Ready for acid-spiked human saliva to wither them and transform their consumers into one-hour butterflies._

Rauv noticed his eyes and looked up into them, red mouth opening in question. His predator quietly waited for Rauv to make himself amusing.

"_You want some?" He held out a capsule, full of an oily green something—not something he had stuffed himself, but instead drawn out of his pocket. Erol quirked an eyebrow, pretended to consider and shook his head, returning to his clear, harmless 'liquor'. _

_But Rauv had noticed the commander neither drank nor cursed, and wondered after other things._

"_Don't like that kind?" He started digging again without question, now scooping out a bag of very solid, grainy-looking pills with a hopeful smile. He shook the bag and the pills reared up and budged like insects. Erol shook his head again._

_  
"I wouldn't deprive you." He said dryly. _

"_No, you can get these for, like, nothing. Hand-job, usually. A blow-job, if they're stiff with you." He laughed at his own pun then held the bag up again, like an infant with a meager, yet all-important offering. "You sure?"_

_Erol made a small, attractive sound that nonetheless assured him of his disinclination._

_Though he nodded, Rauv's hands did not go back to their work. A small bubble of silence wedged in between the two of them, but it wasn't content to hover until popped. The young boy's face screwed up invisibly, pore by pore, and Erol waited for the wave to crash._

"_You never gone under before?" The boy asked suddenly-- yet completely on cue in Erol's thrumming internal clock, like a ball into a slot--eyes widening with his own boldness. He was questioning the Commander of the Krimzon Guard, after all._

_And the Commander of the Krimzon Guard saw no reason to lie._

"_Never." He smiled faintly at the scandalized expression which stretched the boy's face in all the wrong, oily places._

"_Fuck?"_

_It was one of Rauv's more endearing ways of questioning his honesty. Erol shook his head._

"_Why don't you?" He asked, a touch feverish now. His eyes roved hungrily over the older man, as if seeing him in an entirely new—and vastly impressionable—light. "It's really… I mean, fuck?"_

_Erol showed teeth at the idea of being swung into a drugged, swirling world by a child. He was not one to be shown new things. But he decided to indulge, and let a brief twitch of indecision enter his face._

"_C'mon. Just one." Rauv met his eyes in a way he had never before seen in the boy—he enjoyed the new, straightforward attention in the usually cloudy teenager, but, with this ultimatum, found no way to prolong it. It was with a touch of sadness that he said:_

"_Thank you, but no."_

"_It don't hurt, and one can't get you hooked." Rauv grunted—becoming impatient with him now. Somehow, the usual amusement the boy offered wasn't quite breaking the surface, and Erol simply refused again, courteous as can be._

"_C'mon!"_

"_No," Erol said, and it was not a no that could be worn down—it was cold and stagnant, perhaps dangerous._

_Rauv seemed to feel Erol's amusement peter out in front of him, and had learned to play to the man's whims enough to remain silent. As the commander leaned back, he returned to stuffing his capsules, blowing gently to clear his fingers before concocting a different mix. _

_But when Erol rose languidly to his feet, moving past Rauv and into the kitchen, the boy's work went dead in his hands. His eyes rose to the glass of water Erol had left sitting on the coffee table, then darted back to the kitchen entrance. _

_He chose something that wouldn't fizz._

-.-.-.-.-.-

That drug was his currency; a potent, completely unknown force to me. An enemy.

There are no words for what I experienced underneath that substance. It was as though some black god slowly descended, slowly infiltrating—heavy and poisonous and all-powerful. My body became useless. My usually clean motor impulses died halfway to fingers and toes and rotted wetly there in my suddenly unbearable skin, spreading numbness and disease and squelching red rashes in the alleys of my wrists and ankles. I wanted to thrash, and found myself unable.

Gods, I was trapped. My self was beyond my control and terrifying because of it. I had lost myself, that very thing I call my own! I'm sure I pinpointed the cause before I blacked out, but I never completed the thought. The lack of control wound into my gut and threatened to constrict, to choke, to cut off all life. Surely I screamed, before my chin ossified and I fell back against the furniture, seizing. My internal organs rolled and I fought my body's paroxysmal whims all the way into oblivion.

Some find it relaxing, to let go of all your troubles. Or your body, your mind, as though they're such bothersome things. I find it terrifying. I have no troubles—nothing more than meager disputes, little irkings. Things to be adjusted, then forgotten. My world, all that I saw and knew and perfected for myself, all that was fit to adapt to and take pleasure in… was demolished. Without the unity of my body, what stood to stop me from realizing the inconsequence of my mind? Precursors, the earthquake of the disillusioned consciousness!

I cannot express it. To one grounded in a different reality than myself, it must be completely nonsensical, but the terror that gripped me upon realizing that my most rudimentary of skills were gone-- the skill to reason, the skill to control—I wished for death. Sudden, panicked death.

Even then I found time to wonder: is this how other people see their world?

But then, gods, death. The wish for death as my gleaming organs rearranged themselves like weighty slugs, twining and bringing more and more fear. I was nothing, and I screamed defiance at this betrayal of self, of body, of mind. Could I renew my crisp and electric relationship with my nerves after this desecration? Could I salvage this putrefied, dripping tool, all to become whole again?

Gods be it so.

I woke heavy and dark with sweat, twisted around myself with the carpet underneath me blurring shadow into sweat stains. Spittle formed a thin trail from the table, a bilious orange from blood. I'd bitten my tongue to pieces, and a welt shone on my forehead in the window. Nausea erupted, then-- a furious, bitter nausea that resulted in the first retching I'd done in a decade. Upon a brief inspection from the floor (my legs still too weak to stand), my credit pass was gone, as were my pistols. Rauv had stolen them.

He had no idea what he'd done. It was neither the thievery nor the intent that angered me, but the basic experience. I became so enraged, it was as though I'd 'gone under' again, it was so debilitating. At the threat my nerves and corporeal self might retreat into insane _rot_ again, I stifled the thought, dry-heaving away the rest of the fear. The moment I could stand, I stumbled from chair to table, and then coasted sloppily along the walls with flat palms until I reached the door. No weapons, no provisions. I didn't need any, for what I intended to do.

To all dramatic, cliché effects, I hunted him down and killed him.

Forgiveness had never been a concept to me before. Never had a deed been forced on me with such violence, such _gall_, that forgiveness was required. It was simply a course, a turn of events, perhaps applicable to other people who had been seriously trespassed upon…but I certainly had nothing to be forgiven for.

But with Rauv, I had no other words. His actions were unforgivable. I sank to being petty, I dipped into my hideous, red rage and sunk away from that clean, crisp stratosphere of death which utilizes advanced weapons and cold logic. No, I fell to strangling him.

I found him in an alley and paid no mind to the dealers he was in the middle of wooing—fortunate me, they did not protest as I claimed him. One is always grateful for little kindnesses.

I dragged him to a nearby warehouse, seizing him around the middle when he attempted to work his ragdoll body out of the shirt I had in hand, sobbing hysterically all the while. It was all I could manage not to fall to beating him in the street, thrashing as he did. Suddenly he was his age; suddenly he had decomposed to some ugly, pink teenage child with no sense, spiteful. _Spiteful_. How this child had wronged me, how he would _pay_ for this spite! If he ranted or railed, or told me where he had hidden my things, I did not hear. Once inside the hollow grey warehouse, I simply fell to the work of killing him as my red rage would have it.

Strangulation came without forethought. It was the product of my hands and his neck, nothing more. I dropped him halfway through, then flung off my gloves and resumed it. All so I could kill for spite.

Now, part of me can pity him. He must have been terrified during the span in which I came for him. Not a credit was gone on my card. I have healed in my own fashion, but my conviction remains.

Unknown powders are the stuff of nightmares.


End file.
